This weekend was the build gathering and I actually finished this kit before the build gathering even started. This past couple of weeks, I have been dealing with the issues of the paint chipping on one of the chap parts. I had painted the chap piece along with the other parts and masked as I normally masked and the paint chipped when I started unmasking. I ran the part in a tub of lacquer thinner and placed this tub in the ultrasonic cleaner with water and ran it there; then painted and it chipped again. I then soaked the thing in more degreaser, ran it with the degreaser in the ultrasonic cleaner, and left it soak in the degreaser overnight. Then ran the part in isopropanol alcohol in the ultrasonic cleaner and dried the part. Upon close inspection, I found that the mold release was still on the surface of the kit, so those areas were rigorously sanded and the part re-cleaned in alcohol in the ultrasonic cleaner. Dried completely, then repainted and masked without any issues.

With that done,I finally got the rest of her finished and assembled. One of the major last parts was the hair. Once that was finished, I got to working on the details such as clear glosses, washes, the fingernails, and flat coats. The very last piece was her butterfly hair clip. And with that, she’s done!

Sena progresses with the eye painting. I’m still pretty scared of this process and I’m still learning, but here are some things I found that have helped me. I start off with the face getting a coat of white base then painting the main skin tones before going on to working the eyes.

I got two more videos in the can now. One for painting the skin tone and the other for just general painting that includes work with metallics and a little discussion on Alclad paints from the regular metallics to their enamel candy line and hot metal red. As usual, I ran into some issues with the paint chipping off the resin. I attribute the issues to improper soaking or cleaning of the resin. I did soak it over night which is my usual time allotment for that process. But the cleaner may need to be changed out; I’ve been using the same tub of purple power for well over 6 years now, possibly longer. I don’t think there is an expiration, but there’s quite a bit of gunk deposited in the liquid. The parts may have just had some super mold release. Who knows. The process is the same, you accept it and continue.

The following process progressed over several days, and in the video, I compress all this into a 25 or so long video. Post production editing is cool yet laborious work.

Painting Anime Skin Video:

The other video as well as a pictorial description of the kit’s progression so far after the jump.

For any resin figure, after the fun pinning phase, the initial sanding phase, and the first primer; everything goes into a perpetual cycle to work the surface preparation. The first primer layer will reveal most if not all the mistakes in the surface. Pinholes are bubbles in the resin and when found, these are typically just the top of the bubble and just below the surface is the actual bubbles so just applying a filler over this pinhole will not resolve the issue. Rough sanding spots are hard to see in the bare resin and shows up clearly in the grey primer. Missed mold lines are also easily found after the surface has been primed.

I started work on this kit this past weekend. For this project, I’m going to try documenting the entire process with video as I did with the SD Glaug kit. Over the past few days, I’ve created four videos covering the kit unpacking and pinning; initial sanding; cleaning; and initial priming session. The figure is Sena Kashiwazaki (柏崎星奈) from Haganai (僕は友達が少ない), and is cosplaying a character within a game she played in the manga/anime. The kit was made available from キューズQ (QuesQ) at Wonfes 2015 then a few weeks later from their online shop.